Financial Services And General Government Appropriations Act, 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISRAEL. I thank the chairman and my friend. Mr. Chairman, why Tuesday? Why do we have Federal elections on Tuesday? My guess is that most Members of this House of Representatives don't know the answer to that question, and the answer is: There is no good answer for our voting on Tuesday.

There is good reason to change voting from Tuesday to weekends. One out of four people say they don't vote in Federal elections because the weekday is too busy for them. They're balancing their jobs and their schedules and their kids.

I've introduced the Weekend Voting Act, which would move Federal elections from Tuesdays to weekends. And I want to thank the chairman of this subcommittee for including language that I had proposed in this bill directing the GAO to conduct a study on the cost-benefit analysis of weekend voting.

That study is going to answer the question: Why Tuesday? But, more importantly, it's going to answer the question: Why not weekends, and lead to the empowerment of the American people.

We ought to make it easier for people to vote, not harder.

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